Ouch, I can understand why when the player base is getting so small, but I do feel for the people who got really into it (I would have liked to try this one out myself, it sounded intriguing and had possibilities etc to be much more interesting then a vanilla spy based MMO. Seeing the popularity of the films its kind of odd that there is nothing now out based on it. I think if SOE had put the agency money and effort into a new version of the Matrix online they'd have a canvass to put virtually any sort of storyline in there).

As you say once again SOE are getting blamed here, I do wonder if they made a mistake here in not selling/giving it to someone else and therefore avoiding most of the really bad news?

It seems that whatever SOE does they get bad press, it was never going to be good for news like this, but I'm just wondering why I'm not hearing
the same for other companies like Blizzard etc. About the only other major company I've heard get pilloried has been electronic arts for their DRM.

On a different note though, what's the deal with SOE and running 101 8 bit games? Looking at their website you'd think they were developing for a mobile phone with some of the titles (free at least ;) ). Fair enough you need to try something different if your last release fails, but having that many titles fail consistently should be ringing alarm bells in upper management, for me I'd point at a lot of titles and blame a lack of depth of storyline (or storyline full stop) on many of them, Pirates being a prime one that looks like it missed the film hype bandwagon.

I like the vision that SOE seem to have with the station access giving you a variety of games all in one account, but they could do with concentrating on a handful of quality titles here, next I guess SWG and Vanguard will be under threat, Vanguard especially looks in a tricky position with EQ and EQ2 already there as major fantasy MMO's.

I'm a fan of the IP myself so I hope its not a 20 year wait for it to go somewhere, what they did with MxO though while good was adventurous, having a dynamic storyline that evolves real time was always going to be intense to keep up so would need a large player base to support it. I'd be content here if they aimed more at a Eve style offering where you can be part of the universe without having to have a grand storyline to move it along.

Anyway, there is just something I saw on the MxO forums that really got my spider sense tingling here regarding their free station access thing.

"3.) Pirates of the Burning Sea and PlanetSide are NOT going to be available to us. We WILL have access to EQ, EQ II, and SWG."

I cannot think here of any reason to not allow station access to Pirates or Planetside here short of not wanting to herd an ex-MxO player into another soon to be cut MMO. Also Vanguard was ambiguous, its sounding like that was not available on the station access launcher they had either.

Now if it was EQ2 on the list of things you couldn't play, or Free Realms I'd discount it as stinginess from SOE, but this looks like they're broadcasting their intentions to me.